The invasion of American evangelical ideas

Richard Chirgwin in The revolting invasion of American evangelists highlights the fact that the Cori Bernardi's slippery slope argument against gay marriage is actually a copy of the argument used by evangelicals in the USA who used it to campaign against gays in the military.

This doesn’t surprise me: Bernardi has always struck me as too stupid for invention. He is an organizer, a numbers man, an idea-free careerist, all balls, no brains.

Go back just a little distance in America, Land of the Unhinged. The debate was about permitting the military to acknowledge that some of its members are gay. Simple statistics would tell you that, but nobody was allowed to say so, in a delicious paradox for a country that deifies its First Amendment.

And out among America’s theocrats-in-waiting was the same theme. The repeal of laws banning acknowledged* homosexuality in the military was – go on, guess – touted as permitting bestiality. If you need some references, there’s this or this.

Chirgwin goes on to write:

In other words, the link – the “slippery slope” argument that draws an utterly kooky continuum starting at sex with a human and ending at sex with a different species – goes back at least that far.

It’s just another piece of the detestable invention of American snake-oil evangelism. It’s not even Bernardi’s own idea. He’s just spouting someone else’s drivel at us.

And that drivel is the demon spawn of hardline evangelistic American religion, which has been trying to invade Australia, infest our thought, and pollute our politics. In at least the latter, they have succeeded. And in the latter, Cori Bernardi - who seems to owe his loyalties to someone in the USA more deeply than anyone in Australia - deserves not a slap on the wrist, but the loss of his endorsement.

As Chirgwin writes:

If “sex with a man” or “sex with a woman” is on the same continuum as “sex with a sheep”, then doesn’t heterosexual sex sit on the same line?